Cuba is changing fast. President Barack Obama ended restrictions on travel to Cuba without overturning the 55-year-old year trade embargo and blockade, which only Congress can do. In April, Raul Castro stepped down as president, opening up the country to parliamentary elections while appointing a new president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, 57.

Raul Castro had already instituted limited reforms to allow for some private enterprise, changes that the new National Assembly and constitution will only expand. The last Castro will remain chief of the Communist Party.

It was during the “special period” that I first visited Cuba 24 years ago, when the island was in dire straits. I went again last fall where I saw the long-overdue changes now underway.

I witnessed a growing business class evolving from the emerging free-enterprise economy. They have a voice, demand reform and seek a free and open society. Noncommunists are getting elected to the National Assembly. Only 7 percent of Cubans are members of the Communist Party, and almost no recent university graduates are joining it. People are looking to private business and free trade to build the new Cuba. They want the party off their backs.

Meanwhile, Florida’s U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio has urged President Donald Trump to reverse the liberalization that Obama had begun. Since Obama's historic visit, tourism was expanding rapidly, becoming the country’s second-biggest moneymaker, with 619,000 Americans visiting in 2017. Entrepreneurship bloomed. Hundreds of private restaurants were opened, along with “casa particulars,” private guest houses catering to independent American tourists. Old cars were restored for visitors to enjoy. Historic hotels were refurbished.

Cuban-Americans were filling up airline flights, bringing in consumer goods and remittances, and investing in local businesses (which as Cubans they are allowed to do). Over half the Cuban community in Florida supported Obama’s normalization.

Rubio, with his anti-communist Cold War ideology, has become the communist government’s new best friend, an ally of hard-line party officials who have always been fearful of free trade, private enterprise, new ideas and foreign political influence. The party can now continue to blame the U.S. embargo for the state of the economy, instead of its own stubborn inflexibility. Party officials may lose control if the push for political reform and a market economy goes too far, and the resulting tsunami of dollars, people and information that would force the very changes Republicans are demanding.

Rubio and Trump are only hurting the Cuban people, not the government. They tightened the embargo’s screws, restricted business investment by Americans and killed the lucrative tourist trade while dashing the hopes of thousands of Cubans who were finally hoping for a better life.

American visitation to Cuba has slowed substantially. You can still go, but only with a group licensed for educational and cultural exchange. You can no longer go as a private tourist, which is a basic American freedom. And Americans are now forbidden from patronizing hundreds of hotels, restaurants or shops in which the government or military have an interest.

Thanks to Rubio’s vindictiveness toward the country that news reports say he’s never visited, thousands of hotel and restaurant workers, taxi drivers, tour guides and many others tied to the tourist economy — who were earning convertible pesos allowing them to vastly improve their lives — are out of work. Rubio cares only about the votes of the last anti-Castro die-hards in Miami.

Republicans have no problem dealing with one-party communist states like China and Vietnam. But not Cuba, and Rubio stubbornly refuses to understand that the only thing keeping the communist government in power is the U.S. embargo.

Williams is a former journalist, author and solar energy company CEO. He is a year-round resident of Naples.

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